10 posts tagged “nyc”

Great news! Flight of the Conchords has received three Emmy nods for directing, writing, and original music and lyrics. It didn’t get an Emmy nomination for best comedy series, which I think is a sin.
   Not bad for a show conceived by a bunch of Kiwis, even if it did take American money and HBO to get it off the ground.
   And thank goodness it did—how else would it have become so widely received? I can’t see a TV3- or TVNZ-funded Conchords cracking the US market—it would, like Outrageous Fortune, have been remade at best.
   Good luck to Bret, Jemaine and the others associated with the show.

Despite the shock of 9-11, which happened in New Zealand on September 12, 2001 thanks to the time difference (why don’t we insist on calling it 12-9?), I still had to attend the breakfast for the first day of the Wellington Fashion Festival for Lucire. And, that morning, I had to pay for car parking.
   I had used this parking ticket to write on—the back has a note to my father—and when he lent me a suit to wear to Dan’s funeral today, I found this item.
   It brought back a lot of memories and a lot of worries that morning—a friend of mine working for Verizon used to get off at the WTC stop on the subway. I rushed back to the office to see if I could get through to New York, found out everyone was alive, then hung up so other services could use the phone.
   I watched a lot of plans go up in smoke that day—I had intended to return to NYC in October 2001, funnily enough with one intention of checking out the World Trade Center’s observation deck.

I’m sorry to hear about Gov Eliot Spitzer of New York. I remember dealing with him when he was New York State Attorney-General and he was a good guy. He’d get on to emails, was quick to respond, and really wanted to serve the public.
   While I don’t agree with his seeking a prostitute—something that is legal here in New Zealand, incidentally—Gov Spitzer has done the right thing with his resignation, effective Monday. I do hope, however, he can repair the rift in his family that is no doubt there, and that he will still be able to contribute positively to a state which I believe he genuinely loves.

[Cross-posted] John Jones, Stephen Ciuccoli, Kristina Foreman, Amanda Dorcil and Ashleigh Berry are at New York Fashion Week for Lucire, and we’ll be bringing you coverage in the print edition later in 2008. Meanwhile, we’ve managed to get our hands on the videos of the opening, featuring Lipstick Jungle’s Brooke Shields, her co-stars Kim Raver and Lindsay Price, at Bryant Park. Also present was the ever-supportive Fern Mallis, IMG Fashion’s senior vice-president, and Mercedes-Benz marketing VP Stephen Cannon.

When I was a kid new to Wellington, there was a complex called Cubacade, in which there were numerous shops. If you kept walking through Cubacade, you would wind up in an office block called the World Trade Center, complete with American spelling.
   I learned—though this may be apocryphal—that the New York Port Authority got upset and the building later was renamed the Wellington Trade Centre. When I did contract work in that building in the 1980s and early 1990s, it was generally called by its later name.
   These days, Cubacade has given way to Left Bank, though the office block remains. I believe it’s now Ivivi House, though there remains one sign of its original name. In front of the Ghuznee Street car park entrance, the original name can still be seen: World Trade Center.
   In fact, if you Google World Trade Center Cubacade, you can still find numerous references, so evidently some people were still using the original name(s) during the internet era.
   Unlike some of my friends in Stockholm, who rushed downtown when they heard that a plane had hit the World Trade Center (yes, they have one, too), no one here rushed to Victoria Street to check if the 12-storey office building was burning.

   Question for Wellingtonians: the World Trade Center is on what is now Victoria Street. What was the street name 25 years ago?

This was unexpected: the whole Soylent Green movie starring Charlton Heston, online.

http://video.google.com/videohosted?docid=1296155071179146825&q=Soylent+Green+Is+People

   There are some disturbing elements in this dystopic movie, such as references to the greenhouse effect and the destruction of soil by humans.

I don’t know how I missed this, but after browsing Rachel’s blog here on Vox I stumbled on it: Late Show Writers on Strike.
   As has been reported in the news, David Letterman is continuing to pay his staff to December 31 out of his own pocket, even though no shows are going out due to the writers’ strike in the US. You know the man’s a good boss when folks have stuck by him for over two decades.
   The blog shows you can’t keep good writers down. They are writing, and you know, someone could pinch this stuff for a great show. Writers like Eric Roberts and Matt Stangel—or whatever their names are, since we don’t always see the credits—are at it, and the whole team is working hard to keep their humour in the public arena so Dave doesn’t outsource new scripts to South Asia.
   If the show comes back on before the strike is resolved, do look out for the following warning signs.

Top 10 signs The Late Show writing staff has been replaced:
10. Jokes relating to Ganguly and Rahul begin appearing.
9. Richard Simmons’ interview goes on for twice as long as usual.
8. Oprah begins asking if she can return as a guest.
7. Comparisons are made between The Late Show and Bosom Buddies.
6. Comparisons are made between The Late Show and The Tonight Show.
5. Michael Richards, in a free appearance, is announced as guest host for Dr Martin Luther King Jr Day.
4. Scripts refer to ‘Johnny’ and ‘Ed’.
3. Dave compliments Regis.
2. Top 10 lists are one item short.

In case the post before was too British, maybe we should go American? One of my favourite films is Crazy People, even if it depicts the mentally ill as caricatures. To me, it’s more a dig at the Madison Avenue advertising establishment than anyone suffering from mental illness.
   In this film, one agency is confused on how to create truth in advertising after one of its creatives (played by the late Dudley Moore) begins using honesty as a concept. Initially, he is committed to a mental institution (what else would you do on Madison Avenue if an ad exec begins telling the truth?). The first video below pretty much summarizes the story.

   Moore is forced to create more honest ads, but refuses to leave the sanitorium after meeting a fellow patient, played by Daryl Hannah. He and the other patients work on the following. And they pitch Sony, winning the account and creating this TVC. This had been labelled by one person as a banned racist Sony ad on YouTube—sorry, it’s a parody from a film!    I was at B-school studying marketing at the time and thought the ad world might be quite fun. The reality is a little different.

[Cross-posted] The old magic’s back. People who are discovered or have their first big story in Lucire tend to wind up doing bigger things. I can name plenty of names: Amber Peebles, Kathryn Wilson, Zac Posen, Christina Perriam, Denise Vasi. Models are no exception. The latest is Alexandra at One Model Management, who has just landed a Marc Jacobs perfume campaign. She appears in ‘Raven’, a shoot in issue 22 of Lucire in New Zealand, photographed by Kevin Sinclair and with make-up and hair by Natalia Egorova. Above, Alexandra wears Balenciaga and Phi. Congratulations, Alexandra.

 
 

[Cross-posted] A year ago, at this time, I was trying to get to sleep because I knew I would have to get up early to get to Ground Zero to join others commemorating 9-11. I got up around 6.30 a.m. and took the subway in to Manhattan, and met a woman who had travelled there from California. In fact, most of us had come a long way. I spotted two Australian caps among the crowd.
   When 9-11 happened, it was 9-12. Here in New Zealand, I was woken up around 6.30 a.m. by Edward Hodges, who called me after he learned of the attacks. I had returned from New York only weeks before, so this was a surreal moment. But it never hit me: I tried watching the news, the commemorations, and I felt distant. Maybe it was my mind shielding me. That’s why, in 2005, I had to go.
   Although I had one friend who was killed in London last year, on July 7, I lost no friends on September 11. The people who died were friends of friends. The boyfriend of one of my team could not get back into his apartment. A colleague’s office had to be shut till the area was cleared. That was about it.
   I still have pictures, when researching a story, of 9-11 itself, taken from Soho by friends. They showed the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers ablaze. I even had images of those falling to their deaths. I doubt I will ever publish them. But even then, it was still some event, some tragedy, in a foreign country. I must have had ice water in my veins.
   But last year, it finally hit. I saw the firemen at Engine Company 10 mourn the loss of their colleagues, and comrades from Europe came to join them. I saw the notes people had signed on memorial boards. I saw tears. An old man wore a T-shirt commemorating his son, a firefighter who perished in the World Trade Center. Cops were there: hard, big blokes who could have stared down crims had tears to contend with in their eyes that day.
   It touched me because these were people like me. Of every race. Every creed. Every culture.
   Condi started talking below, but it didn’t matter. I was already in the moment.

Where are we now? I remember doing business in New York was easy. People trusted you. Shook your hand. People were globally minded, thinking, ‘What borders?’ I can’t do business in New York anywhere near that readily any more. Suspicion first. Get a cast iron contract. Weigh people down before you make them your friends.
   The business environment in New York, which is all I really knew, changed drastically that day. That is what the terrorists robbed the US of: not its wealth, not its power, but its trust of cross-border dealings.
   A friend of mine, who was a waiter in New York, told me that people were nice to him—a gay, black man—for about two weeks. After that, the mood soured. He was back to being just a waiter. But something was worse.
   My Arab–American friends told of people reading Arabic-language newspapers, published in the United States by Americans, getting kicked out of restaurants and cafés.
   There was something seriously wrong. And if we are to show the terrorists that they are insignificant, cowardly bastards, then I long for a return to the America I knew and started working with, and in, in the 1990s.

I still stand by my words written on September 11, 2001. If I had a blog then, these would be on it.